*Myhrvold-Hanssen, T. L. 2003. Democracy, News Media, and Famine Prevention: Amartya Sen and The Bihar Famine of 1966-67.
*Neumayerb, E. & Plümpera, T. 2009. Famine Mortality, Rational Political Inactivity, and International Food Aid. World Development 37 (1) , 50-61.
*Rubin, O. 2009a. “The Merits of Democracy in Famine Protection – Fact or Fallacy?” European Journal of Development Research 21 , 699-717.
*Rubin, O. 2009b. “The Niger Famine: A Collapse of Entitlements and Democratic Responsiveness.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 44 , 279-297.

Sen’s point about information is stronger than you perhaps make it seem: bureaucracies in authoritarian governments have lots of incentives to falsify information that goes to the top leadership, as do all bureaucracies, but in democracies there are alternative sources of information (the free press). It is not so much that top leaders in non-democratic countries don’t care (though they sometimes do not), as that, on average, even if they care, they both fail to have sufficient information about the true dimensions of the problem and cannot be easily “shamed” into action by the common knowledge produced by a free media. (Mao is supposed not to have known much about the famines caused by the Great Leap Forward, for example, even though these famines killed millions of people, but even if he had known, it would have been difficult to shame him into action). The informational problems in non-democracies are severe enough that sometimes non-democratic rulers allow for freer media than might be expected; see the recent article by Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin (2009) in the APSR on “Why Resource-poor dictators Allow Freer Media”.

Moreover, even if only 10% of the population is actually affected by famine (e.g., actually suffering from starvation) a much larger group is usually at risk, and politicians are more likely to respond to such groups (with some exceptions - see the literature above). It is not merely that some care about others starving, but that others see themselves as at risk of starving (many famines occur in extremely poor countries where many people have low food security to begin with) and hence are more likely to pressure governments to do something. (This mechanism may break down if, for example, the starving belong to a different ethnic group or are seen as otherwise distant from one’s own situation).

Regarding the democracy/growth connection, though the literature is tangled, Sen is very much right: if you simply compare growth rates between democracies and non-democracies (using a measure of democracy like the Polity score, or like the Freedom House score) democracies grow on average more or less as fast as non-democracies, though non-democracies exhibit more variability (there are more growth disasters and more “miracles” among non-democracies; democracies grow with less variability). In fact, if you use the data on growth from the Penn World Tables from 1950 to 1990 and the Polity data on democracy and autocracy for the same period, democracies actually come out slightly ahead, though the result is not necessarily statistically significant given measurement errors. There are of course all kinds of issues about causality that nobody has been able to satisfactorily disentangle, but Sen is right that there is no evidence that democracies grow, on average, more slowly than non-democracies.

The standard reference is probably Przeworski, Adam et al. 2000. Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950-1990. Cambridge University Press, which finds no real differences between dictatorships and democracies in terms of growth, but more recent work supports the idea that democracy is in no way a disadvantage to growth, and may be actually beneficial. See, e.g., Gerring, John et al. 2005. “Democracy and Economic Growth: A Historical Perspective.” World Politics 57(3): 323-364. A recent meta-analysis of a variety of studies also found support for the idea that democracies are better for growth than non-democracies, though via indirect effects on human capital (Doucouliagos, Hristos, and Mehmet Ali Ulubasoglu. 2008. “Democracy and Economic Growth: A Meta-Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science 52 (1):61-83.)

There are also theoretical reasons to expect that democracies would actually do better than most non-democracies in terms of simple economic growth; see, e.g., Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce et al. 2001. “Political Competition and Economic Growth.” Journal of Democracy 12(1):58-72, which summarizes their book The Logic of Political Survival. So Sen is on pretty solid ground.

In fact, I don’t think the “received view” that democracies are bad for growth is really “received” any longer among economists and political scientists; even economists who are skeptical of a link between democracy and growth, like Barro or Acemoglu, don’t argue that democracy is bad for growth, or that dictatorships are better than democracies.